Related Podcast

Māori film maven Leo Koziol says the late Geoff Murphy stood by Māori to tell authentic stories about Aotearoa.

Murphy, who died on Sunday aged 80, was part of the ground breaking Blerta collective of musicians, actors and filmmakers, before pulling together the resources to make films like Goodbye Pork Pie and Utu.

Mr Koziol says like some of the American Westerns coming out at the time, Utu used the Western format to ask hard questions about the treatment of indigenous peoples.

"But it also told the story

of our own Māori culture, the belief system of Utu and just an incredible story and that film, along with Ngāti about the same time, was was a nursery for many of those in the Māori film industry who are part of the institution today," he says.

Mr Koziol says the current film by Murphy and Merata Mita’s son Heperi Mita, How Mum Decolonised the Screen, is also Murphy’s story.

Climate Change is here now - what will we do?
Martyn 'Bomber' Bradbury: News last week that the latest studies show Antartica is in danger of melting should shake us from any complacency that climate change is some distant event at the end of the century.